Comment by tw04
4 years ago
I'm genuinely curious how this was positioned to the IRB and if they were clear that what they were actually trying to accomplish was social engineering/manipulation.
Being a public university, I hope at some point they address this publicly as well as list the steps they are (hopefully) taking to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. I'm also not sure how they can continue to employ the prof in question and expect the open source community to ever trust them to act in good faith going forward.
first statement + commentary from their associate department head: https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384954220705722369
Wow. Total sleazeball. This appears to not be his first time with using unintentional research subjects.
Source:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=Lor...
This is quite literally the first point of the Nuremberg code research ethics are based on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code#The_ten_points_...
This isn't an individual failing. This is an institutional failing. This is the sort of thing which someone ought to raise with OMB.
He literally points to how Wikipedia needed to respond when he broke the rules:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
As far as I can tell, the papers he co-authored on Wikipedia were unlike the abuse of the kernel contribution process that started last year in that they did not involve active experiment, but passive analysis of contribution history.
Doesn't mean there aren't ethical issues related to editors being human subjects, but you may want to be more specific.
I didn't see any unethical work in a quick scan of the Google Scholar listing. I saw various works on collaboration in Wikipedia.
What did you see that offended you?
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